The Festival Chair

About The Festival Chair

For one week every August, Harlow Cove stops being a hard-luck lobstering harbor and becomes the prettiest town on the coast — banners over the co-op, the Hundred-Pot Bake steaming on the wharf, and out on the water the lobster-boat races that pay the whole village's winter heating bills. Maren Sayward has run the festival for three years and dreads it the other eleven months, because Maren is the woman with the clipboard, the headset, and the master binder, and she knows to the minute where every cooler, vendor, volunteer, and boat is meant to be. So when the festival starts coming apart in the days before opening — fouled crates, cut power, a scrambled race roster — the harbor reaches for the comfortable enemy: a saboteur out to ruin the Cove's biggest week.

And when the hometown racing champion turns up dead by the wharf the night before the races, the whole town reaches the next conclusion in the same breath: the wrecker went too far. Everyone agrees the saboteur became a killer. Everyone except Maren, who wrote the run-of-show herself and knows the wharf circuit that supposedly killed him was scheduled stone dead at that hour — tagged, locked out, and logged by her own hand.

The trouble is far closer than she'd like: the frightened boy the town wants to hang it on is her own nephew, and Maren knows something the harbor doesn't — that he really did wreck the festival, though he never laid a hand on the champion.